“I am the useless poet, lost in sick world.” Du Fu
In 15 selected poems from the Tang-dynasty (golden age of Chinese poetry) Ehrenstein is philological translating poems of Du Fu, Li Tai Po, Han Yu and Po Chu-I.
During his exile in Switzerland the poet Ehrenstein, who fled from the national socialists, identified himself with the miserable folk. Ehrenstein had an huge interest for Chinese poetry, but he himself could not speak Cantonese, Mandarin or any other Sinitic language. Nevertheless he is capable to mediate the tremendous sadness, the shame a person feels, when an impoverished launderer offers hospitality out of her own meagreness or the rootlessness and sadness of beggars roaming around like lose leafs in the wind. Again a proof of timelessness and universally applicable of tragedies and sadnesses.
